Editor’s Note: The following essay was submitted in response to Jared Gould’s Top of Mind column, “Young Americans Are Right to Be Angry—But Their Education Keeps the Cycle of Frustration Going,” published on August 21, 2025.
Sorry for the late response, but I’ve been away from the web, visiting relatives and hiking. I read your lament about why young people feel so frustrated with life and helpless to do anything about it.
As I recall from my youth, many young men felt the same during the Vietnam War. They got drafted, trained, handed a deadly weapon, were shipped off to a place they couldn’t find on a map, and were told to kill people they didn’t know existed. At home, some were too young to drink beer or vote, but they could be shipped off to kill for their country. One can forgive them for being confused, a bit resentful, and, frankly, scared. Those who protested were rarely those who wound up on patrols in the jungle. To this day, nobody has explained why we sent so many young men to die or be maimed in such a futile endeavor, or why we repeated the same mistakes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yes, our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan were volunteers, but the bureaucratic futility and incompetence were comparable. Frankly, what young people experience today is a walk in the park compared to what they experienced in those times.
Why young people today are frustrated and resentful is complicated.
Universities are nothing more than finishing schools for the process. Without a doubt, today’s youth are the most protected and pampered generation since Homo sapiens evolved. In every way, they are shielded from even the mildest adversity—a word worn to tatters by the media. They must wear bike helmets; they can’t walk or ride alone to playgrounds; they are padded with rubber to make them lawyer-proof; they are rarely disciplined for rude or destructive behavior at home or at school. Doting parents hover perpetually overhead in helicopters. Schools, terrified of students and their parents, hand out participation trophies like Halloween candy. Sports take precedence over homework—when schools bother to require homework at all. Boys are expected to behave like girls, and schools indoctrinate students with myths that even our early ancestors would likely have dismissed as nonsense.
As icing on the cake, many students graduate with little to no knowledge of science and mathematics, leaving them uncompetitive with students from other countries for many high-earning professions that will define the future. It is this that makes them resentful and angry because there is no obvious way out by the time they should be reaching adulthood. Universities simply teach them to focus their anger on targets favored by a professoriate that has little else to offer.
Do these young people have valid reasons for feeling resentful and angry? Yes, because they did not raise themselves. Regrettably, and understandably, they are low-hanging fruit for the likes of Bernie, AOC, Mamdani, and a media and professoriate that believe in true Marxism: all must be destroyed before building the socialist paradise.
As for your use of the terms “exploit” and “obscene profit,” I am going to assume that you got up on the wrong side of the bed before writing because I think you understand that neither of these terms accurately depicts the situation these young people find themselves in. People in our society and economy are not exploited any more than lions exploit zebras. It’s the nature of a naturally competitive world in which most people have less than we do, some much less, and thanks to a connected world we have built, they know it and want what we have. True obscenity is lack of profit, which socialism guarantees, because it is profit that makes future investment and growth of the pie possible. Hence, the stagnation that socialism has always produced. We will not keep what we have if the pie does not grow.
It would be refreshing for a change to read or hear proposals from the online “expert” commentariat about what we are going to do with our miseducated and resentful young people, who are so ill-equipped to compete in an increasingly competitive world full of less fortunate and very hungry young people who are better prepared to compete in that world. Allowing so many resentful people to languish is not a sensible option for our democracy. Envy and resentment produce Mamdanis. Those of us who have lived in the New York City area for decades have seen what his kind of politics produces. We, as in We, the People, have let these young folks down by providing miseducation in a protective cocoon rather than the challenging environment of real education. In the process, we have allowed them to waste their youth.
So, what are we going to do to make amends? How do we help them make up for a wasted youth rather than continue down a path that stokes their resentment and makes Mamdani-style politics seem attractive? This may be a bigger challenge than fixing our broken K-12 and higher education systems, but this is the kind of problem we pay “experts” to address, and so far, they seem to be ignoring it.
As always, thanks for your articles. They are always food for thought.
Image by Sergey Novikov on Adobe Stock; Asset ID#: 318394450
“People in our society and economy are not exploited any more than lions exploit zebras. It’s the nature of a naturally competitive world in which most people have less than we do, some much less, and thanks to a connected world we have built, they know it and want what we have.”
What a lot of people don’t realize about John Adams is that he was a deeply religious man who had attended a seminary (which is what Harvard still was at the time) and married the minister’s daughter. Adams said that “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Much as Maggie Thatcher understood that “the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money”, Adams (et al) understood that capitalism had to be checked by the ethics of a moral and religious people lest the competitive carnage you depict occur. And the difference is that Zebras can neither vote nor engage in guerrilla warfare — humans can.
Heck, John Hancock understood this and it was Governor Bowdoin’s “Lions and Zebras” attitude that had provoked Shay’s Rebellion which, had Hancock not replaced Bowdoin as Governor, likely would have progressed into a second American Revolution. (Have you ever wondered why the US Constitution stipulates that bankruptcy law is Federal?)
Remember one thing about the 1991 LA riots — neighborhoods where over half the people owned the buildings they were living in did NOT burn. While their properties may not have had much value in the larger scheme of things, they had a vested stake in the system and they were up on their roofs with rifles, protecting it.
Conversely, if I were in New York City, I’d vote for Zohran Mamdani — what do I have to lose? Not abstracts of “trickle down” and that rich people create jobs (which is true), what visible effects would Mamdani have on me? And I mention in this context that what really did in Bush 41 was the tax on beer — other taxes were abstractions, the extra dollar was painfully visible to Joe Sixpack.
As to Vietnam, yes that sucked — but never forget that the war was lost on American college campi. The Soviets spent a *lot* of money influencing this, and Bill Clinton classified the records that the US government obtained when the Soviet government imploded.
That said, a lot of the guys who went to Vietnam were able to then go onto a comfortable middle class living. Much of our current Emergency Medical System was literally built by Vietnam medics (and other combat vets) using what they had learned there to save lives here. The concept of stabilizing a victim at the scene of an accident — routine today — was new. Back then it was “scoop and run” — which we still use for severe trauma, but not for routine stuff.
A lot of guys learned trades ranging from truck driving to welding in the war and came home to well-paid union or public sector jobs. Lots of people in state and Federal government jobs got there because of their veteran status. And what a lot of these guys shared with me personally is the resentment they had toward the stereotype of the Vietnam vet because the majority of them weren’t crazy.
But the big difference between being a White male in 1965 and being one in 2025 is that back then, doors weren’t closed. Back then, if you graduated from college, you’d have a job waiting for you. Now the first job goes to the son-in-law, the second to the woman, the third to the minority or gay, and you have a chance at the fourth — except that there aren’t going to be four jobs.
The minimum wage in 1965 was $1.25 — that would be $12.65 in today’s dollars, but actually more if you factor in the vastly higher cost of housing today. Back then you could pay for a year’s college tuition with the earnings from your summer job — that ended about 1978.
Maggie Thatcher was right, but so was John Adams…